Yes, mine is an opinion, an no more special than that of others. But yours and theirs is no more special either.
I didn't try making my opinion of how much people need more important than anyone else's by trying to denigrate people for having "more than they need". My reply didn't say there weren't people who sought more than was good for everyone else, so arguing with me about that point is a waste of time.
really?
So, exactly WHAT search engine competes against Google?
Bing. Yahoo. Both are valid, active competitors.
Facebook ? Who else has more than 50% of the market?
I'm sorry, but you're making 50% of the market the definition of monopoly? That's silly. And asking "who else has more than half" shows a serious lack of math skills.
Amazon? Don't get me started there. NOBODY competes against them
You need to take the blinders off. There are uncountable numbers of companies that sell stuff, and a still uncountable number of companies that sell stuff on the internet.
By breaking these companies up, into just 3 companies each, it would get competition moving forward.
You don't need to break anything up, there is already competition. Yes, it is hard for newcomers in a market to gain a foothold, but that's true for every market that is already established. The correct solution to the non-problem is not to punish companies that are successful for being successful. That's looney.
BTW, when W/O bailed out GM and chrysler, they should have broke them apart into smaller companies and had them competing
Yeah, because clearly GM and Chrysler do not compete against each other, and there is no other competition in the automotive marketplace. Really?
I think the idea is that you bring wireless to the building and then multiple units in that building sign up
There is only one "unit" in a single family dwelling. The claim isn't that it isn't economical for Google, it was that it wasn't economical for the consumer.
I understand that there may be LOS issues, but if you are in the middle of a group of large apartment buildings you'll have those, too. They are also a different excuse than "not economical for the consumer".
Smaller companies are willing to live on smaller margins
Google has enough inertia that they can operate at a loss for a long time in a small division to grow it into a profit center.
Google, Facebook and Amazon are all good ones to be broken up. Not sure why they pointed to apple when in fact they have no real monopoly and no longer are considered to be the top dog in anything.
Google, Facebook and Amazon have no real monopoly, either.
But, if Google was broken up, vertically into say 3 different googles and all with the same search capabilities, then they would compete against themselves
Why not bust them up into 100 different "googles"? The more competition the merrier. Multiple the necessary infrastructure to provide the search services by a factor of 100, that will certainly result in better cheaper faster, right?
and that infrastructure requires significant expense in man-hours to get permits, space leased and palms greased before the first foot of cable can be unspooled at a site.
All it takes is the building owner giving them an access agreement and sign a contract for service. It can't get much easier than that. For fewer than 30 units every unit gets service and the owner gets one bill -- pretty cheap for accounting.
it's the jurisdictional processes (ROW access, easements, etc. etc.)
There is no ROW or easement issue. The owner of the building says "ok". What rights-of-way do you think are involved?
can't seem to crack the nut that is your local cigar-chomping county commissioner and the planning board he sits on.
They were already in business in Boston. It seems they had "cracked" the planning board and county commissioner, even with what little authority they had to stop Google from installing hardware in a private building.
What I wonder is why nobody is flaming google for their stupid excuse for not providing service to single-family homes. "It wouldn't be economical for the consumer". What? It's $60/month for gigabit internet service. That's cheap. Why wouldn't it be economical for someone to have that service? Hidden fees and taxes? What? Compared to Comcast 100Mbps it's absolutely marvelous pricing.
You missed the point completely. I thought it was obvious by showing it was your opinion -- how much people "need" is an opinion, everyone's got one, and yours is no more special than anyone elses. That's why saying someone has "more than they need" is a waste of time.
I wasn't driving and my gender didn't match the driver.
This is so un-PC that I cannot imagine the CA government allowing it to happen. It doesn't matter that your sister looks like a girl and you look like a boy, your sister can be a boy if she says she is. I mean if he says he is. And you could be a girl even though your existing/. nick says you are a boy -- things change, sometimes on a daily basis. You can no longer tell just by looking at a photograph what gender anyone is, even if you limit it to a binary decision. When you consider that you might have a 37%/63% in-between...
I'm foreseeing a future where driverless cop cars pursue and stop driverless vehicles...
Hello, Captain Obvious. AV will, of course, have a system where emergency vehicles can force them to pull over and stop. There will still be ambulances and police cars that run "code 3" and need all the traffic to get out of the way. The only difference between getting all vehicles to pull over and stop so an emergency vehicle can get through and an emergency vehicle stopping YOUR vehicle is that they'll pull in behind you.
This system will have to be implemented before the first driverless car is allowed on the streets for real. Imagine the fun when an ambulance is on the way to a heart attack and an AV is going smack at the speed limit blocking the lane and won't pull over for the flashing lights. That will be one of the many laws that will have to be programmed in, and some method of reliably detecting when it is necessary to obey.
Somebody further upthread was saying that alerts get transmitted based on cell tower,
Well, that certainly explains why I got an alert for Taiwan while I was in Oregon. Certainly I was receiving a Taiwanese cell tower from a location that has some pretty high mountains to the west -- right in radio line of sight to Taiwan. Maybe it was EME? Earth-moon-Earth radio bounce. Meteor scatter? I don't know, but certainly we must accept what someone "upthread" said about things and I must have been receiving a cell signal from thousands of miles away.
The problem is hearing "this is not a drill" all the time then desensitizes you to the actual phrase "this is not a drill" in an emergency.
No. It is part of the real message, it needs to be there in the exercise message so there can be no question about what the message means. Sending different messages means you train differently than you fight. That's bad. That leads to confusion and errors. Standard terminology is used ALL THE TIME because using non-standard terminology requires the recipient to interpret and study and consider and likely come to the wrong conclusion. (That is NOT what happened here.) You use the real message in a drill because that gets the recipients used to seeing what the real message looks like. You don't use something different and then hope they properly identify the message when the time is critical and the emergency is real.
If people get used to mixed messages,
IT IS NOT A MIXED MESSAGE. You just don't understand the system, you are not trained on how the system works, and we really don't care that you don't understand. Just stop pretending your guesses as to how things ought to work are more important than decades of experience and practice.
It is an example of an exercise message that instructs the recipient to do something EXCEPT for the fact that it is an exercise message. Same as the missile alert.
Or rather an example done right, because it
a) contains indication that is an excercise AND
Just like the missile alert.
b) does NOT contain a confirmation that it is a real order.
Pay attention. "EXERCISE EXERCISE EXERCISE" means it is not a real message. An exercise message cannot tell someone it is real, because any wording in the exercise message that says it is real IS NOT REAL.
Let's turn your example into an example that followed tha Hawaii-missile pattern:
a) contains indication that is an excercise AND
b) DOES contain a confirmation that it is a real order.
You can try, but my example was accurate.
but use your wording and we get: ""exercise exercise exercise please send 500 gallons of potable water to the Waimea rescue shelter. This IS NOT an excercise. I repeat: This is NOT an excercise"
Fail. You use the words "this is not an exercise" twice. The missile alert message says "this is not a drill" once. And it says that AFTER IT CLEARLY AND IN PLAIN LANGUAGE SAYS THAT IT IS AN EXERCISE.
Here's what you really don't understand. Any real request for supplies will be signed by an official that can authorize that request. That signature implies it is real. EXCEPT when the message is an exercise message. Then EVERYONE WHO KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE DOING knows it is an exercise message and should not be acted upon except as an exercise message.
YOU don't know that, and that's fine. YOU are not the intended recipient of such messages. YOU don't get to tell the experts how you would do it based on your ignorance of the process.
I don't dispute this, but this is exactly what you are recommending
You are not recommending what I am talking about. You think it is good to replace a simple, declarative sentence with code words. That's wrong. You think the test message should not be the same as the real one because YOU can't understand the difference. That's ridiculous.
in fact it's worse than secret decoder ring BS because it contradicts what the language plainly says.
NO IT DOES NOT. You simply cannot accept that the word "EXERCISE" repeated three times means the message is an EXERCISE MESSAGE. That means that the contents ARE NOT REAL. It is PLAIN LANGUAGE. How many times do I have to repeat that? There is no contradiction. "This is not a drill" is not REAL when the entire message is an exercise message.
You have no clue how the systems work because you've never been trained on them, and it doesn't matter that you don't know. YOU ARE NOT THE INTENDED RECIPIENT OF THE MESSAGE. Nobody cares that you don't understand, and nobody cares what you think ought to be done.
Here's the thing: if you want people to understand "this is NOT a drill" to mean, not what the words plainly say, but to mean "this is time critical", you have to (a) have a policy that states this and (b) train people on that meaning.
They are.
In fact there apparently was no such training, so there was apparently no such policy.
No, not "in fact" there was no training. I've already pointed out that the operator did not claim there was ambiguity in the message, but that he didn't hear part of it. He was trained and knows what "this is not a drill" means. In fact, HE DID IT.
In any case if the word count is more paramount than clarity here,
The clarity is PERFECT, when you know the meaning. YOU haven't had the training because nobody gives a fuck if YOU understand that message. You don't work in an emergency operations center.
you could use an arbitrary phrase like "code black" and train people on what that means.
Once again we are expected to replace decades of experience with your "common sense" shortcuts.
"This is not a drill" is a simple, short declarative sentence that means exactly what it says. Plain language.
What decades of experience has taught the people who do this for real (and aren't just nimrods pontificating about what "common sense" tells them how it ought to be done, on slashdot) is that plain language is much better than codes or secret decoder rings. This is embodied in something called the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and the Incident Command System (ICS) which came about in large part as the result of failures during large scale fire fighting in California. FEMA has FREE courses that can give you an orientation to the process. I've linked you to ICS-100b, which is the introduction. Go learn something. Maybe learn how to be useful to your community when a disaster strikes and not be an impediment yammering about how everyone ought to be doing things because you have common sense and know better. Or not.
Military folk, back me up here: in any of the drills that you experienced during your service, has the phrase "this is a drill" or "this is not a drill" ever occurred?
Yes. You want to limit your question to "military folk", but it is not just "military folk" who deal with emergency alert systems.
Thing is, if you say "exercise" at the beginning and then say "this is not a drill" it's quite reasonable to assume that the later one countermands the earlier one.
No. It is not reasonable to assume that. The people who do this, and to whom these messages are sent and processed, understand the system a LOT better than you do, and aren't supposed to make assumptions. "EXERCISE" three times means it is an exercise, no matter what the message contains, because knowing what the REAL message says is important even if you are conducting an exercise.
Really? "Exercise" is a little vague to me. "This is not a drill" is definitely clear.
Nobody cares what is clear to you, you don't work in an emergency operations center. It is PERFECTLY clear to anyone who does, and who has ever had any training on how to do this kind of thing. The excuse being given by the alert operator is not that the message was vague, it is that he didn't hear part of it. Had he heard it, he would have known immediately and without doubt that the message was not a real alert, it was an exercise.
How can that phrase emphasize that it's a real emergency if it's also used in drills?
Because the exercise messages all say that they are exercise messages, and thus the contents are NOT REAL.
And if you want to emphasize that time is critical, why not say that?
"This is not a drill" is five words. It is the result of decades of experience of people who do this for a living and have done exercises on a regular basis. You're demanding explanations as to why they do it that way as if they had no reason at all.
The solution seems simple to me
We shall discard decades of experience of people who do this for a living and substitute your feelings. We shall create an exercise message that differs from the real alert in just ONE WORD, and creates the potential for mistake in sending the IS message in place of the NOT message. I'm glad you're here to educate us all on how it really ought to be done. Thank you.
Now, what happens when the communications channel has a dropout during that one critical point in time that the word "NOT" is being transmitted? When using HF radio, for example, it is not uncommon for words to be lost. (That's why "EXERCISE" is sent THREE times.) That would turn a critical emergency message into just another (yawn) exercise. And what happens when the originator chooses the wrong one of two messages -- turning a drill into a panic, or a real emergency into a drill? I'm sure you have solutions to both. You're the expert.
The NPR report says both that the message included it and that it ended with it. That doesn't say that it only ended with it. That could mean it began and ended, which is how it should be done according to standard practices. NPR might be trying to emphasize that the disclaimer came after the real message, as if to assign blame somewhere.
According to the NPR story the message concluded with "exercise, exercise, exercise". I don't know where you're getting your information.
An earlier comment said that, and it is standard practice to do it that way. NPR has never been wrong, though. Ever.
What I'm saying is if that is true, it shouldn't be part of the real message.
Of course it should. It is isn't a drill you don't want people wasting their time wondering "this can't be right, is it a drill?" You say it isn't a drill. Period.
Otherwise, what purpose do you imagine it serving in a real emergency?
Umm, I don't know. Maybe to emphasize it is a real emergency? That time is critical? That you don't go for coffee before you process the message?
This kind of thing has been done for decades now. Lessons learned from previous exercises need to be continued, not abandoned because people who are not involved in the process in any way don't understand why it is done the way it is when they hear about it for the first time.
This is almost entirely a government problem, not a carrier problem. Sending alerts that are trivial or when no one is at risk is what degrades warnings. That's 100% on the government.
The government issues alerts. The carrier knows where the phones are and can determine which ones are actually in the alert area.
They don't do that. That's why you get Amber alerts for cities that are 400 miles away. They know you are in Bohoken, NJ and don't need an Amber alert for Forshoken, KY, but you get it anyway because your phone has a Forshoken area code. They need to do better, and limit alerts to a reasonable physical area.
That's not to say that the government doesn't issue too many alerts, but they're doing what the people want. The people who say "I don't care about your kids being abducted and can't help" are a minority.
I can beat all of you as for distance out of area alerts. It was only a test, but I got a test alert from TAIWAN while I am in OREGON. Talk about useless. The phone was intended for Taiwan so it was configured to get Taiwan alerts, even when it was used on an US carrier in the US. That was my unwelcome introduction to the alert system.
There is no purpose to the phrase "this is not a drill" if you use it in drills. Better to omit it.
If it is part of the real message, then it needs to be in the exercise message. That way you know what the real one sounds like. It's called "training". That way you don't have to wonder why the alert message you just got didn't sound like what you're used to.
The relevant emotion here is fear.
Ok. I just heard a message that began "exercise exercise exercise" and it made me so afraid that I have already forgotten that I heard it. Does that work better for you? Really? You're scared of the words "exercise"? You better not be working in an emergency notification center, then.
If you're told in the same message that it's a drill and it's not a drill, then there is a misunderstanding.
No. It is STANDARD PRACTICE to use the phrase "exercise exercise exercise" to indicate that no matter what follows, this is an exercise message. This is not something new.
Do you believe that an exercise message that reads "exercise exercise exercise please send 500 gallons of potable water to the Waimea rescue shelter" should actually result in 500 gallons of water being sent? Of course not. "Exercise exercise exercise", words repeated three times so they are not missed, means the rest of the message is not real life and should be treated like, umm, what's the right word for it, oh yeah, an EXERCISE.
But why use the real message in an exercise? So people get used to knowing what it says and so you don't accidentally send the wrong version in a crisis.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously ...
Wow. Woosh to the tenth power.
Yes, mine is an opinion, an no more special than that of others. But yours and theirs is no more special either.
I didn't try making my opinion of how much people need more important than anyone else's by trying to denigrate people for having "more than they need". My reply didn't say there weren't people who sought more than was good for everyone else, so arguing with me about that point is a waste of time.
really? So, exactly WHAT search engine competes against Google?
Bing. Yahoo. Both are valid, active competitors.
Facebook ? Who else has more than 50% of the market?
I'm sorry, but you're making 50% of the market the definition of monopoly? That's silly. And asking "who else has more than half" shows a serious lack of math skills.
Amazon? Don't get me started there. NOBODY competes against them
You need to take the blinders off. There are uncountable numbers of companies that sell stuff, and a still uncountable number of companies that sell stuff on the internet.
By breaking these companies up, into just 3 companies each, it would get competition moving forward.
You don't need to break anything up, there is already competition. Yes, it is hard for newcomers in a market to gain a foothold, but that's true for every market that is already established. The correct solution to the non-problem is not to punish companies that are successful for being successful. That's looney.
BTW, when W/O bailed out GM and chrysler, they should have broke them apart into smaller companies and had them competing
Yeah, because clearly GM and Chrysler do not compete against each other, and there is no other competition in the automotive marketplace. Really?
I think the idea is that you bring wireless to the building and then multiple units in that building sign up
There is only one "unit" in a single family dwelling. The claim isn't that it isn't economical for Google, it was that it wasn't economical for the consumer.
I understand that there may be LOS issues, but if you are in the middle of a group of large apartment buildings you'll have those, too. They are also a different excuse than "not economical for the consumer".
Smaller companies are willing to live on smaller margins
Google has enough inertia that they can operate at a loss for a long time in a small division to grow it into a profit center.
Lmao. Single family homes? Boston. B O S T O N.
Don't give a crap about B O S T O N. You can't get service anymore in B O S T O N. I am referring to D E N V E R. And no, not J O H N.
Google, Facebook and Amazon are all good ones to be broken up. Not sure why they pointed to apple when in fact they have no real monopoly and no longer are considered to be the top dog in anything.
Google, Facebook and Amazon have no real monopoly, either.
But, if Google was broken up, vertically into say 3 different googles and all with the same search capabilities, then they would compete against themselves
Why not bust them up into 100 different "googles"? The more competition the merrier. Multiple the necessary infrastructure to provide the search services by a factor of 100, that will certainly result in better cheaper faster, right?
and that infrastructure requires significant expense in man-hours to get permits, space leased and palms greased before the first foot of cable can be unspooled at a site.
All it takes is the building owner giving them an access agreement and sign a contract for service. It can't get much easier than that. For fewer than 30 units every unit gets service and the owner gets one bill -- pretty cheap for accounting.
it's the jurisdictional processes (ROW access, easements, etc. etc.)
There is no ROW or easement issue. The owner of the building says "ok". What rights-of-way do you think are involved?
can't seem to crack the nut that is your local cigar-chomping county commissioner and the planning board he sits on.
They were already in business in Boston. It seems they had "cracked" the planning board and county commissioner, even with what little authority they had to stop Google from installing hardware in a private building.
What I wonder is why nobody is flaming google for their stupid excuse for not providing service to single-family homes. "It wouldn't be economical for the consumer". What? It's $60/month for gigabit internet service. That's cheap. Why wouldn't it be economical for someone to have that service? Hidden fees and taxes? What? Compared to Comcast 100Mbps it's absolutely marvelous pricing.
How much power should peple have, then?
You missed the point completely. I thought it was obvious by showing it was your opinion -- how much people "need" is an opinion, everyone's got one, and yours is no more special than anyone elses. That's why saying someone has "more than they need" is a waste of time.
I wasn't driving and my gender didn't match the driver.
This is so un-PC that I cannot imagine the CA government allowing it to happen. It doesn't matter that your sister looks like a girl and you look like a boy, your sister can be a boy if she says she is. I mean if he says he is. And you could be a girl even though your existing /. nick says you are a boy -- things change, sometimes on a daily basis. You can no longer tell just by looking at a photograph what gender anyone is, even if you limit it to a binary decision. When you consider that you might have a 37%/63% in-between ...
But, we have human nature intervening, people grabbing power and more than I think they need and being jerks to others.
FTFY.
I'm foreseeing a future where driverless cop cars pursue and stop driverless vehicles...
Hello, Captain Obvious. AV will, of course, have a system where emergency vehicles can force them to pull over and stop. There will still be ambulances and police cars that run "code 3" and need all the traffic to get out of the way. The only difference between getting all vehicles to pull over and stop so an emergency vehicle can get through and an emergency vehicle stopping YOUR vehicle is that they'll pull in behind you.
This system will have to be implemented before the first driverless car is allowed on the streets for real. Imagine the fun when an ambulance is on the way to a heart attack and an AV is going smack at the speed limit blocking the lane and won't pull over for the flashing lights. That will be one of the many laws that will have to be programmed in, and some method of reliably detecting when it is necessary to obey.
Somebody further upthread was saying that alerts get transmitted based on cell tower,
Well, that certainly explains why I got an alert for Taiwan while I was in Oregon. Certainly I was receiving a Taiwanese cell tower from a location that has some pretty high mountains to the west -- right in radio line of sight to Taiwan. Maybe it was EME? Earth-moon-Earth radio bounce. Meteor scatter? I don't know, but certainly we must accept what someone "upthread" said about things and I must have been receiving a cell signal from thousands of miles away.
The problem is hearing "this is not a drill" all the time then desensitizes you to the actual phrase "this is not a drill" in an emergency.
No. It is part of the real message, it needs to be there in the exercise message so there can be no question about what the message means. Sending different messages means you train differently than you fight. That's bad. That leads to confusion and errors. Standard terminology is used ALL THE TIME because using non-standard terminology requires the recipient to interpret and study and consider and likely come to the wrong conclusion. (That is NOT what happened here.) You use the real message in a drill because that gets the recipients used to seeing what the real message looks like. You don't use something different and then hope they properly identify the message when the time is critical and the emergency is real.
If people get used to mixed messages,
IT IS NOT A MIXED MESSAGE. You just don't understand the system, you are not trained on how the system works, and we really don't care that you don't understand. Just stop pretending your guesses as to how things ought to work are more important than decades of experience and practice.
Meeep. Wrong example.
It is an example of an exercise message that instructs the recipient to do something EXCEPT for the fact that it is an exercise message. Same as the missile alert.
Or rather an example done right, because it a) contains indication that is an excercise AND
Just like the missile alert.
b) does NOT contain a confirmation that it is a real order.
Pay attention. "EXERCISE EXERCISE EXERCISE" means it is not a real message. An exercise message cannot tell someone it is real, because any wording in the exercise message that says it is real IS NOT REAL.
Let's turn your example into an example that followed tha Hawaii-missile pattern: a) contains indication that is an excercise AND b) DOES contain a confirmation that it is a real order.
You can try, but my example was accurate.
but use your wording and we get: ""exercise exercise exercise please send 500 gallons of potable water to the Waimea rescue shelter. This IS NOT an excercise. I repeat: This is NOT an excercise"
Fail. You use the words "this is not an exercise" twice. The missile alert message says "this is not a drill" once. And it says that AFTER IT CLEARLY AND IN PLAIN LANGUAGE SAYS THAT IT IS AN EXERCISE.
Here's what you really don't understand. Any real request for supplies will be signed by an official that can authorize that request. That signature implies it is real. EXCEPT when the message is an exercise message. Then EVERYONE WHO KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE DOING knows it is an exercise message and should not be acted upon except as an exercise message.
YOU don't know that, and that's fine. YOU are not the intended recipient of such messages. YOU don't get to tell the experts how you would do it based on your ignorance of the process.
Does that make it clear now?
I don't dispute this, but this is exactly what you are recommending
You are not recommending what I am talking about. You think it is good to replace a simple, declarative sentence with code words. That's wrong. You think the test message should not be the same as the real one because YOU can't understand the difference. That's ridiculous.
in fact it's worse than secret decoder ring BS because it contradicts what the language plainly says.
NO IT DOES NOT. You simply cannot accept that the word "EXERCISE" repeated three times means the message is an EXERCISE MESSAGE. That means that the contents ARE NOT REAL. It is PLAIN LANGUAGE. How many times do I have to repeat that? There is no contradiction. "This is not a drill" is not REAL when the entire message is an exercise message.
You have no clue how the systems work because you've never been trained on them, and it doesn't matter that you don't know. YOU ARE NOT THE INTENDED RECIPIENT OF THE MESSAGE. Nobody cares that you don't understand, and nobody cares what you think ought to be done.
Here's the thing: if you want people to understand "this is NOT a drill" to mean, not what the words plainly say, but to mean "this is time critical", you have to (a) have a policy that states this and (b) train people on that meaning.
They are.
In fact there apparently was no such training, so there was apparently no such policy.
No, not "in fact" there was no training. I've already pointed out that the operator did not claim there was ambiguity in the message, but that he didn't hear part of it. He was trained and knows what "this is not a drill" means. In fact, HE DID IT.
In any case if the word count is more paramount than clarity here,
The clarity is PERFECT, when you know the meaning. YOU haven't had the training because nobody gives a fuck if YOU understand that message. You don't work in an emergency operations center.
you could use an arbitrary phrase like "code black" and train people on what that means.
Once again we are expected to replace decades of experience with your "common sense" shortcuts. "This is not a drill" is a simple, short declarative sentence that means exactly what it says. Plain language.
What decades of experience has taught the people who do this for real (and aren't just nimrods pontificating about what "common sense" tells them how it ought to be done, on slashdot) is that plain language is much better than codes or secret decoder rings. This is embodied in something called the National Incident Management System (NIMS) and the Incident Command System (ICS) which came about in large part as the result of failures during large scale fire fighting in California. FEMA has FREE courses that can give you an orientation to the process. I've linked you to ICS-100b, which is the introduction. Go learn something. Maybe learn how to be useful to your community when a disaster strikes and not be an impediment yammering about how everyone ought to be doing things because you have common sense and know better. Or not.
Military folk, back me up here: in any of the drills that you experienced during your service, has the phrase "this is a drill" or "this is not a drill" ever occurred?
Yes. You want to limit your question to "military folk", but it is not just "military folk" who deal with emergency alert systems.
Thing is, if you say "exercise" at the beginning and then say "this is not a drill" it's quite reasonable to assume that the later one countermands the earlier one.
No. It is not reasonable to assume that. The people who do this, and to whom these messages are sent and processed, understand the system a LOT better than you do, and aren't supposed to make assumptions. "EXERCISE" three times means it is an exercise, no matter what the message contains, because knowing what the REAL message says is important even if you are conducting an exercise.
Really? "Exercise" is a little vague to me. "This is not a drill" is definitely clear.
Nobody cares what is clear to you, you don't work in an emergency operations center. It is PERFECTLY clear to anyone who does, and who has ever had any training on how to do this kind of thing. The excuse being given by the alert operator is not that the message was vague, it is that he didn't hear part of it. Had he heard it, he would have known immediately and without doubt that the message was not a real alert, it was an exercise.
How can that phrase emphasize that it's a real emergency if it's also used in drills?
Because the exercise messages all say that they are exercise messages, and thus the contents are NOT REAL.
And if you want to emphasize that time is critical, why not say that?
"This is not a drill" is five words. It is the result of decades of experience of people who do this for a living and have done exercises on a regular basis. You're demanding explanations as to why they do it that way as if they had no reason at all.
The solution seems simple to me
We shall discard decades of experience of people who do this for a living and substitute your feelings. We shall create an exercise message that differs from the real alert in just ONE WORD, and creates the potential for mistake in sending the IS message in place of the NOT message. I'm glad you're here to educate us all on how it really ought to be done. Thank you.
Now, what happens when the communications channel has a dropout during that one critical point in time that the word "NOT" is being transmitted? When using HF radio, for example, it is not uncommon for words to be lost. (That's why "EXERCISE" is sent THREE times.) That would turn a critical emergency message into just another (yawn) exercise. And what happens when the originator chooses the wrong one of two messages -- turning a drill into a panic, or a real emergency into a drill? I'm sure you have solutions to both. You're the expert.
The NPR report says both that the message included it and that it ended with it. That doesn't say that it only ended with it. That could mean it began and ended, which is how it should be done according to standard practices. NPR might be trying to emphasize that the disclaimer came after the real message, as if to assign blame somewhere.
According to the NPR story the message concluded with "exercise, exercise, exercise". I don't know where you're getting your information.
An earlier comment said that, and it is standard practice to do it that way. NPR has never been wrong, though. Ever.
What I'm saying is if that is true, it shouldn't be part of the real message.
Of course it should. It is isn't a drill you don't want people wasting their time wondering "this can't be right, is it a drill?" You say it isn't a drill. Period.
Otherwise, what purpose do you imagine it serving in a real emergency?
Umm, I don't know. Maybe to emphasize it is a real emergency? That time is critical? That you don't go for coffee before you process the message?
This kind of thing has been done for decades now. Lessons learned from previous exercises need to be continued, not abandoned because people who are not involved in the process in any way don't understand why it is done the way it is when they hear about it for the first time.
This is almost entirely a government problem, not a carrier problem. Sending alerts that are trivial or when no one is at risk is what degrades warnings. That's 100% on the government.
The government issues alerts. The carrier knows where the phones are and can determine which ones are actually in the alert area.
They don't do that. That's why you get Amber alerts for cities that are 400 miles away. They know you are in Bohoken, NJ and don't need an Amber alert for Forshoken, KY, but you get it anyway because your phone has a Forshoken area code. They need to do better, and limit alerts to a reasonable physical area.
That's not to say that the government doesn't issue too many alerts, but they're doing what the people want. The people who say "I don't care about your kids being abducted and can't help" are a minority.
I can beat all of you as for distance out of area alerts. It was only a test, but I got a test alert from TAIWAN while I am in OREGON. Talk about useless. The phone was intended for Taiwan so it was configured to get Taiwan alerts, even when it was used on an US carrier in the US. That was my unwelcome introduction to the alert system.
There is no purpose to the phrase "this is not a drill" if you use it in drills. Better to omit it.
If it is part of the real message, then it needs to be in the exercise message. That way you know what the real one sounds like. It's called "training". That way you don't have to wonder why the alert message you just got didn't sound like what you're used to.
The relevant emotion here is fear.
Ok. I just heard a message that began "exercise exercise exercise" and it made me so afraid that I have already forgotten that I heard it. Does that work better for you? Really? You're scared of the words "exercise"? You better not be working in an emergency notification center, then.
If you're told in the same message that it's a drill and it's not a drill, then there is a misunderstanding.
No. It is STANDARD PRACTICE to use the phrase "exercise exercise exercise" to indicate that no matter what follows, this is an exercise message. This is not something new.
Do you believe that an exercise message that reads "exercise exercise exercise please send 500 gallons of potable water to the Waimea rescue shelter" should actually result in 500 gallons of water being sent? Of course not. "Exercise exercise exercise", words repeated three times so they are not missed, means the rest of the message is not real life and should be treated like, umm, what's the right word for it, oh yeah, an EXERCISE.
But why use the real message in an exercise? So people get used to knowing what it says and so you don't accidentally send the wrong version in a crisis.
Horse is dead. Nothing to see here. Move along.